Richard Greenberg quotes:

I want to be a playwright the way people are bank tellers. I want to keep doing it and have it go steadily and smoothly.

My friends and family have been so well trained that they know I really mean it when I say that I don't care if the review is good, because that can be as dangerous as when it's bad. It's less demoralizing, but it can be just as confusing.

My usual route is, I do a play at South Coast Rep, then there's time between and I revise it, and then I take it to New York.

I was formed by 'The Forsyte Saga' marathon. There was something about seeing all those events telescoped that was unbelievably moving: that sense of time as something that can be tinkered with.

People talk about alienation in the city. Diners are a place where you feel comfortable, an extension of your house.

I appreciate people who are civil, whether they mean it or not. I think: Be civil. Do not cherish your opinion over my feelings. There's a vanity to candor that isn't really worth it. Be kind.

For some reason, 1968 is a touchstone year for me. I think it was the first year I felt fully conscious.

It seems that the hurdle you have to jump over is everyone's informed opinion. When you're a young playwright, you're probably too precarious in your own technique to understand that when these seemingly informed opinions are contradicting each other, it becomes this paralyzing monolith.

I like the Mets. I'm interested in the Mets.

I'm sort of anti-Aristotelian. I want to get an entire life onstage while conveying a sense of how time feels, how unstoppable it is, and how we don't really know what's going on because as we're trying to weave, it's weaving us.

I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what's missing, and that's my first draft.

When we watch a play under the standard circumstances, we've lost volition and time is passing. A still play feels like an existential threat.

The ocean is interacting with the surface. There is a possible biosphere that extends from way below the surface to just above the crust

A play gets on Broadway by fluke. And you don't even start out with that ambition. When I do a play, the intention is just to put it up somewhere.

I do think the past changes at a slower rate. It sits a little more still for its portrait.

You do think, if you have your druthers, 'I want to sort of be, not anonymous, but unknown'. But you don't have your druthers in life, do you?

Frankly, seeing my plays with an audience is something I do with gritted teeth; I find the experience very difficult. I love the moment when you have just the dress rehearsal, when no one's there; that's kind of the peak to me. When people start filing in, I like to file out.

The idea of a rupture between acts occurs in a number of my plays.

But you don't have your druthers in life, do you?

I had a plot connection that nobody understood for this fourth character, and decided, Oh, nobody gets it, that's all. I'll write another draft to make her make sense. It took me awhile to learn that these three people were the core of this play, which seems so obvious now.